Past opportunity
Fabric Warp and Weft Orientation with Autoliv
Industry
Automotive safety
Revenue
2020
$7.4B
Employees
2020
68,000
Countries
2020
27+
About
Autoliv is committed to operating its business at the highest level of quality and at the most efficient cost possible. In airbags, fabric utilization is one of the predominant cost drivers and production is using high efficient software that define how to best position the multiple fabric components to be cut from a roll of fabric. Fabric do not have exactly similar properties in longitudinal (warp) and transversal (weft) directions.To comply with our customer’s specifications and our quality standards, the warp and weft orientation of the fabric inside the cut subcomponents require control.
Opportunity overview
Current customers’ specification require that fabric orientation (warp and weft) are clearly indicated on the cushion in a legible manner. This is today realized by printing lines in the warp direction on the rolls of fabrics. The drawback of these prints is that our automatic quality inspection devices occasionally reject products because of the print. Therefore, we are aiming to remove these prints and implement a self-usable image recognition tool that will be accessible to everyone at Autoliv and to our customers. We believe that we can benefit from the wide use of cameras on smartphones connected to a shape recognition software. Anyone who needs to control the fibers’ orientation on a fabric sub-component of an airbag can take a picture on their smartphone and submit it to the software. The solution should work with pictures from a wide range of cell phones and taken without using a camera holder; and be usable in different distances, angles and lighting conditions in lab, office and production area environments. An easy-to-use, cost-efficient and scalable software solution is strongly preferred over a hardware solution with additional equipment.
Your Opportunity with Autoliv
Autoliv has committed resources (incl. a team and a budget) for an internal pilot project of the solution in one of their production facilities. A successful solution may be further scaled to wide internal use e.g. to multiple production facilities. The end goal is to eliminate the need of inkjet printing on fabric to decrease errors in automated quality inspection and overall simplify the process of fabric warp and weft orientation identification.
Focus Areas
Examples of solutions we’re interested in
Software interface
A software interface that will e.g. automatically analyze a picture sent by a user in an email and reply the user by email with the warp and weft orientation shown on the picture.
Backend algorithm
A piece of image recognition software that is capable of analyzing the warp and weft orientation from a picture with non-standardized photo distance, angle and lighting conditions.
A scalable solution
An easy-to-use and versatile solution requiring just a standard smartphone. Usable by all office, lab and production employees, and Autoliv’s customers.
This opportunity is no longer accepting submissions
Check out any potential
